


dance to this electrolyte beat!

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Coming of Age, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:48:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26491402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: Mark’s reflection stared at the version of Jaemin physically standing in his bathroom. His shoulder was pressed up against the doorframe with peeling paint, flecks of it already rubbing off onto his navy athletic jacket. “I mean, honestly dude,” he began without too much of a pause, overly loud for no particular reason, “don’t you – you kinda look at all your friends like you want to kiss them, you know? Haha.”
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Na Jaemin
Comments: 21
Kudos: 103
Collections: K-Pop Ficmix 2020





	dance to this electrolyte beat!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xies/gifts).
  * Inspired by [love letters (& stupid wishes)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24653599) by [lovecity (xies)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xies/pseuds/lovecity). 



> **dear xies,**
> 
> i truly loved the joy that love letters (& stupid wishes) gave me when i read it T___T that said, this is really not cute or fluffy at all and probably something unexpected considering the source material but i do hope you enjoy it somewhat ♡ thank you for giving me the chance to remix your fic!
> 
> also a huge thank you to the mods for all your patience!! T___T
> 
> **[EDIT 10/20]** after exactly a month this fic is finally DONE i am so sorry for stringing this out so long!! thank you so much for all the lovely comments that i will get around to replying to soon TT_____TT also extra special thank you to shida for the on-the-spot najaem meta [markly voice] this one's for you *misses basket*
> 
> [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1YRhbMR2PMq6rvMimmqE61?si=4b5CaMb-QSu4ttn6CdBnuA)

Jaemin sometimes hears his own thoughts in Renjun's voice, more out of habit than anything else. Like the way he'd say _huo guo_ in his perfect Chinese that they could never quite coax Jaemin's tongue to mimic, or his drawn out _okaaaaay_ every time he'd let Jaemin wheedle him into another idea of his, usually of the bad variety. Nine times out of ten once it all went south, Renjun would choke out an _I told you so!_ between peals of laughter, his hand so warm and lovely and small in Jaemin's. _So_ – in his humble opinion – he'd never taken that as a true instance of failure, but apparently Jaemin was a fetid pit of too many bad hot takes that no one else who knew the both of them AND possessed a decent sense of self-preservation would reasonably take his side.

Effectively, Mark Lee is questionable on the latter. Which is why Jaemin’s sitting on the same sofa that he yakked all over two weeks prior, in complete defiance of Mark’s apartment mate Chanhee’s vague edict-slash-threat written in high school science hypothesis format: _IF_ I see you in our apartment again, _THEN_ I will… And, to be fair, Jaemin does _not_ want to know what’s on the other side of that ellipsis, but Jaemin also has a grand total of, like, two friends at university and Mark’s the nicer one between them, seeing as he’s renewed Jaemin’s “three strikes and you’re out” policy on his apartment furniture. He glances sideways at the shitty wall clock he’d gotten Mark from a Goodwill in place of apologizing for the two camping chairs he’d broken – also while drunk – ticking half an hour late.

“Fuck, man,” Jaemin says, just to say something. The replacement sofa cushions that Mark ordered off Amazon, a few shades too light a blue to match the rest of it, don’t fit all the way in either, forming a miniature mountain at the small of Jaemin’s back. “It’ll be fine after a while,” Mark told him when he caught Jaemin staring at the topography first thing after turning the corner. “Like… gravity and stuff, right?” Mark has also been sitting directly on the bump every time he eats his sodium-laden TV dinners in between coding sessions. Seeing that on Jeno Lee’s Instagram story made Jaemin all the more acutely aware that the both of them might’ve peaked in high school.

“What’s up?” asks Mark over the clacking of his laptop keys. The room’s starting to tint gray from the past-set sun, and the light from Mark’s laptop screen turns his face a blue-ish white, but neither of them move to turn on the lights. Jaemin’s mouth’s gone dry from forgetting to down a whole bottle of water after not waking up until four o’clock in the afternoon, dragging himself five units down to Mark’s, and weighing over all the trivial things he’s been wanting to say for the past seventy-four minutes, give or take thirty by the Goodwill clock.

“I.” He covers his eyes with an arm. His vision goes fuzzy and dark behind it, and his throat feels like a desert, down to the tell-tale burn that he swallows down. “Last night,” he starts again. Mark _mmm’s_ in indication of listening. Jaemin lets his arm flop down and consequently hits his funny bone on the couch frame. “Renjun messaged me.”

Mark stops to look at him. “Oh,” he says from where he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“Yeah.” _Oh,_ is also what he’d said when he saw that Jaemin threw up on his couch. He’d helped him to his bathroom, anyway, and let Jaemin take some toothpaste and do his best to scrub the barf taste out with his finger. Jaemin always wanted to ask Mark why he’d bothered being so nice to him, but there never seemed to be a right time or place for the loaded sentimentality.

“I – uh.” Mark nervously taps a drum beat with his index fingers against the coffee table. Sounds suspiciously like Will Smith’s “Miami.” “You gonna text him back or something?”

That night, Jaemin had glanced at him miserably in the bathroom mirror. He was still dizzy from the alcohol, and he remembered what it’d felt like to fall out of love with Mark in high school. Like a gradual loss of magnetism, at some point, Jaemin just stopped looking for him in the hallway. It’d been almost deceptively easy then, unlike –

“Do you think,” he’d started, words slurring together. He moved a hand from where he was leaning against Mark’s sink to rub his forehead. “That I look at Renjun like I’m still in love with him?”

Mark’s reflection stared at the version of Jaemin physically standing in his bathroom. His shoulder was pressed up against the doorframe with peeling paint, flecks of it already rubbing off onto his navy athletic jacket. “I mean, honestly dude,” he began without too much of a pause, overly loud for no particular reason, “don’t you – you kinda look at all your friends like you want to kiss them, you know? Haha.”

Mark’s laptop screen goes black. Jaemin’s eyes start to adjust to the sudden darkness. Finally he says, “I don’t think I should,” and they leave it at that.

Things were best between them the summer before they left for college. It'd been so hot for those three months that time seemed to hang in a sort of limbo, and deceptively, in that last-high-school-summer golden fever dream way, every moment they spent together felt simultaneously like forever, or like it would melt away like cotton candy when pressed against Jaemin's tongue.

He'd been helping Renjun pack for college in mid-August, and they'd rolled down the windows all the way but the air was still. It was precisely that time of the evening where the sun rays caught on every hovering particle of dust, creating a miniature galaxy in Renjun's bedroom.

Renjun looked at him from where he was starfished on his bed in an oversized t-shirt and basketball shorts. The angle gave him a triple chin, and Jaemin couldn't help but grin as Renjun squinted at him carefully. _"Hey!"_ he said once he realized what Jaemin'd been holding in his hands. "Don't read that again! It's so embarrassing!"

Jaemin held it out of his reach when Renjun lethargically peeled himself off the bed to snatch it back. "It's cute, Injunnie," he cooed. "You know that I've never heard anyone else describe their crush as having a 'lizard smile?' That means you must really like me, right? Hmm?"

Renjun made a face at him. “You’re _annoying,”_ he deflected, giving up on the letter.

“But you love me anyway,” Jaemin chirped back. He offered the letter back to Renjun, who stared at it like it might grow fangs and bite him. “It’s the first time someone’s ever given me a love letter before,” he said, voice softening.

“I wrote it in _middle school.”_ Jaemin held it up just as Renjun made a move to grab it back, and he huffed. “No one else’ll write you a love letter again if you’re gonna act like a grade schooler, Jaemin Na!”

The setting sun was perfectly round outside the open blinds of Renjun’s window, and it framed his head in a fluorescent creamsicle orange. “It’s okay to say you love me, Renjun Huang,” he’d said then, suddenly aware of how close they were standing to each other that he could feel the warmth radiating off of Renjun’s body, and how far apart they’d be once college started. For all they promised each other things wouldn’t change between them – the suspended heat of the summer suddenly felt like an illusion, that moment of pause at the height of a roller coaster before the world flew past you and everything was no longer the same. “I’m not gonna break your heart.”

Briefly, Renjun looked at him like he might move in to kiss him. And then the moment broke, and he jokingly reached for the letter in Jaemin’s hand again, his crooked-tooth smile tinted a green afterimage of the sunset behind him.

In retrospect, Jaemin had told the truth back then. In fact – Jaemin finds himself coming back to this singular memory so often, turning it over and over and over again in his mind, that the corners of it are frayed and the actual words are fuzzy but the feeling is there, and that’s what matters to him.

Maybe sometimes, you don't realize how looking at other people was keeping your world in motion. And without them, you're frozen in that last place where you'd been looking at them, staring at nothing but the memory.

If you didn't know any better, you could say that Jaemin was over Renjun Huang just by looking at his social media footprint. Meaning: it was hard to tell when his last Instagram post was a series of photos taken next to the obnoxiously bright welcome week banner from his freshman year of college dated 2018, and Renjun had wished him a happy birthday on his Facebook wall last August. Jaemin heart-reacted it, but that was probably way before shit hit the fan. In any case, if you were optimistic enough and only knew Jaemin Na peripherally from high school, it'd make sense to think that he wouldn't still be gutted like a fish over a break-up that happened more than eight months ago.

In truth, he's got an incognito search history of the people Renjun's tagged in his own posts, and he's presently sitting across from his cousin Serim, picking the bones out of the mackerel his mom had dropped off tupperwares of last weekend while arguing a case over why he'd be a good fit for Tinder.

"I'm empathetic," Jaemin lists off. There was that time his sophomore year in the dorms when he filed a noise complaint against his next door neighbor for having sex in the middle of finals week, only for them to counter with their own report when Renjun came over two days later. To be fair, most people were on winter break by then, so if you _had_ to go with the lesser evil – _"And_ I'm funny. I'm pretty handsome –" Serim chokes on her rice at that, but Jaemin forges on, undeterred "– I think that adds up to me being a good catch, right?" No pun intended, even.

Serim takes a sip from her thermos sagely. "Empathetic," she echoes, sounding thoroughly unconvinced. As far as cousins go, Serim's pretty weird. The weirdness and the cousin part having no real correlation other than the fact that their moms, apart from the sibling rivalry they'd never quite outgrown, were also notorious gossipers who couldn't keep a secret. The result was the two of them growing up oddly keyed in to each other's lives, a habit that unfortunately carried over when they realized they'd be spending the next four years within a close proximity of one another by going to the same university. "That's a new one. Who told you that?"

Jaemin gives up on the de-boning, picks off a sizable chunk of mackerel flesh with his chopsticks, and stuffs it into his mouth, getting a fish bone caught in his throat be damned. "Mark." He didn't actually, but Jaemin thought that of all two of his friends, he'd be the most likely to say it.

Serim must agree, because instead of questioning its plausibility, she just moves on. "Jaemin Na on Tinder," she says, biting down on her chopsticks contemplatively. "Really never thought I'd see the day."

"What? Why not?"

She looks at him like he has to be kidding. "You and Mark Lee have got to be, like, the biggest serial monogamists I know."

 _"Heeeey."_ The worst part is that this isn't even a bad judgment. Mark's been dating Donghyuck for four years now, still going strong, and Jaemin's – "Maybe I just want in on this part of the college experience. You know, like, the whole fucking around thing."

Serim scrunches up her nose in disgust. "I hope you know that I don't want to hear about _any of this,"_ she reassures him, folding up the half-finished bag of shrimp crackers she'd brought over and snapping the binder clip to seal it closed. "I literally just came here to get some of your mom's food."

"The typical Jo Serim dine-and-dash," Jaemin yawns as she opens his fridge and stacks her half of the tupperwares into her reusable grocery bag. "You better wash those before you give them back to me."

"Oh, right." Serim throws something towards him from where she's still crouched, and the packaging's a little wet where it came into contact with refrigerator condensation. "My mom said to give these to you."

Jaemin stares at the little green box of Salonpas in his hand. He can smell the menthol even through the cardboard, and it's like a Pavlovian slap in the face even now, all these years later. "My back's fine," he replies tightly, ready to throw them back.

"Keep them," Serim says, slinging her grocery bag over her shoulder. She walks to the door and slides her feet into her sneakers without pulling the heel on properly. That kind of thing always drove Renjun crazy and Jaemin almost says –

She pauses after wrenching the door open, smiling over her shoulder at him like a Cheshire Cat. "Maybe you'll need them. You know, for your 'college experience.'" And then she shuts the door behind her, and Jaemin's left with a phantom pain tingling down his spine.

Strangely enough, the break-up was – on technical terms – mutual. Even stranger was the fact that they'd agreed to stay friends at all, though that part of it didn't hold up quite as well as the former.

Speaking of friends, Jaemin runs into his second of a whopping two at his 8AM Ochem lecture come Monday morning. "Hey," he says to Jeno Lee as he scoots past his legs in the cramped auditorium row, shooting him his most fool-proof ahjumma-charming grin. Jaemin unceremoniously dumps his backpack that was resting on the chair beside him back into his lap. "Thanks for saving me a seat, man."

Jeno scowls at him without tearing his gaze away from his laptop screen. "Stop sitting next to me, Jaemin." Out of high school, miraculously, most of Jaemin and Renjun's shared friend group ended up split between two colleges both within a one hour radius of their hometown – aside from Donghyuck Lee, who ended up going to some music school across the country, but hey, like, good for him. And out of that select sample size, Jaemin and Jeno happened to end up in the same major and, as a result, have been running into each other way more frequently than they both would've liked since freshman year.

Jaemin mimes a stab wound to the heart. "You're really gonna say that to me when I saved your ass in lab last semester?"

"I didn't ask you to," Jeno replies. Really, they'd never been close growing up, even standing on the peripherals of their mothers' friendly encounters at the Korean supermarket on weekends, and Jeno had been Renjun's friend first, anyway. Really, it was weirder for Jaemin to insist on scanning the lecture hall every first day of class for the past three years for any sign of Jeno and don a toothy grin as he walked over to sit next to him. Other than rolling his eyes every time Jaemin plunked into the seat beside him, Jeno barely acknowledged him, but Jaemin's mildly convinced that he'd miss him if he stopped. "Don't you have other friends you can talk to?"

"Nope." Jaemin pops the p without missing a beat.

"What about your volleyball friends? Hyunjin and Yukhei?"

Jaemin shrugs. "They're busy."

Jeno finally shoots him a judgmental glance. "Are you saying that I'm not?"

"No." It was more like this – after Jaemin's back injury flared up again and forced him to quit volleyball for good, it was hard to listen to Yukhei talk about his practices for the college team he'd been recruited to play on, or the intramural competitions Hyunjin signed up for. At some point, Jaemin stopped responding to their messages and they’d just stopped trying to talk to each other at all. "I just think we're pretty similar, you know?" Jaemin taps his pencil against his chin in a pretense of thought. "The two of us. As people."

Jeno laughs incredulously at that. "Okay, _sure."_ Jaemin, who's been bouncing his knee underneath the little foldable table attached to the seat hits too high and sends his notebook splatting to the ground. "Pretend like you're not trying to keep tabs on Renjun by talking to me."

Jaemin picks up his notebook just as their professor strides in. Spins his pencil between his fingers. Keeps bouncing his knee – hubris plagued even the greatest Greek heroes, after all.

"It's been kinda a long time since we broke up," he starts, tongue like lead in his mouth. "It's not really about that anymore." And god, doesn't Jaemin wish that were true.

'Cause honestly: Renjun and Jaemin _did_ try the whole friends post-break up thing out. A month out from ending things, Mark's friend was having a party that some of Renjun's film school friends from their university forty-five minutes away were planning on attending.

 _r u good if i go or ?,_ Renjun had texted him two days before. At that point, they'd been caught in the weird in-between of forcibly changing _this made me think of you_ habits, fingers hovering over the call button or, worse, accidentally butt-dialing after pulling up the other's contact and haphazardly shoving their phones back into their pockets after recalling that they didn’t belong to each other anymore. _c u there! :),_ Jaemin had sent back after a mild existential crisis.

This had ended like –

"You're so afraid of being loved," Jaemin said loud and embarrassingly drunk and teary eyed outside Mark's friend's apartment complex, where he'd thrown up in the bushes after his first college party. "Why are you so set on pushing me – no,” he screwed his eyes shut in what felt like a slow motion sequence of unraveling his guts, _“Everything_ we've gone through away, Injunnie?"

Renjun had Uber-ed over that time and made him congee for the hangover, laughed at Jaemin's misery and told him he was like a baby.

"Your baby, though," Jaemin had insisted through his raging headache, even after the Advil.

Renjun turned to look at him from where they were sitting, side by side on Jaemin's ugly orange dorm room carpet. "Yeah," he shook his head, fond. "I guess you're mine."

There was a strange sense of impermanence Jaemin had felt when they'd officially called it quits between them. Like, somewhere in the midst of those five stages of grief, he always looped back around to the denial that that had to be the true-cut end of it all. After all this time, loving Renjun felt so much like an instinct that Jaemin didn't know if the human body was physically capable of rewiring itself to feel this way for anyone else. That had to be a biological liability somehow left untouched by centuries of natural selection, if the trepidation that Jaemin felt in his chest over Renjun’s non-response was anything to go off of.

But this is how he truly knew it was over. Renjun sighed, wisps of steam in the cool night obscuring his face. When they cleared, his eyes were sad but dry, and so, so far away even though they were standing less than five feet apart.

"Jaemin," started Renjun, hands in his pockets of a coat that fit him in the shoulders just right that it couldn't be Jaemin's. He had a sneaker on the overgrown lawn in front of the building, and the long blades of grass caught underfoot were smashed against the sidewalk, and the midnight air was sweet with the sense of impending heartbreak.

Cleared his throat, as if to soften the blow: "I'm not in love with you anymore."

Jaemin used to think affection was something that grew linearly. Possibly the side effects of being a habitual overachiever, he’d always been rewarded with the fact that if you gave it your all, those feelings would eventually find their way back to you tenfold, and that had to be happily ever after.

But how people felt changed like the weather. You couldn’t control what you meant to other people, no matter how hard you tried to herald storms of your own creation. It was easier for Jaemin to think that things could’ve gone better with more effort than to admit this.

Mark – as the only one who could afford shelling out extra for a parking spot in their apartment complex, probably because he and Chanhee have been housing one of their mutual friends, Youngkyun, off-the-lease and receiving his clandestine accidentally-not-set-on-private rent stipend over Venmo every month – offers to drive them all home the weekend before _Chuseok._ This proves to be a good idea in principle, especially after all their moms hear through their suburban Korean-American gossip chain that good church boy Mark Lee's been driving since he was sixteen and passed his driver's test on his first try, so the offer is really just a formality, but ten thousand times more awkward than expected in execution. Point being: Jaemin realistically should've sat in the passenger seat since he was actually friends with Mark, but he couldn't in good conscience leave Serim, who went to the high school across town and knows goose eggs about everyone except for Jaemin, sitting next to Jeno in the backseat. As a result, it's a fifty-minute-an-hour-and-fifteen-with-traffic commute of almost suffocating silence, even when Mark suggests they play the categories game to brush up on their Korean in a last-ditch effort to prevent their relatives from calling them _gyopo._ This keeps them occupied enough until Jeno calls Jaemin out for his literal translation of snake fruit, and as Mark's trying to keep the peace by offering partial credit, a car almost barrels into them full-speed from the carpool lane amidst bumper-to-bumper lane congestion. And then they're back to listening to the symphony of Mark's overly-silent Prius engine and the faint melody of the American Top 50 coming through Serim's Beats until he drops them each off soccer-mom style, waiting to drive away until after they've gone inside their houses, taillights blinding compared to the dim residential street lamps.

Serim plunks down her plastic bowl with a bag of washed carrots that one of their moms directed her to shred onto the kitchen table. Some of the onions Jaemin got put in charge of get shifted by her forcefulness and start rolling. He catches one before it can fall off the table just as Serim hisses, “You really have to say exactly what you’re thinking, don’t you?”

Jaemin peels another onion skin. “Is this about Jisung?” he asks nonchalantly.

“Who else?” Jisung was the baby cousin of their generation, though really he was only two years younger than the both of them. Anyway, he’d holed himself up in the bathroom after talking to them in excruciating humble-brag detail about how _hard_ his life was as a senior in high school, to which Jaemin kindly replied, “Jisung, high school really doesn’t fucking matter,” and then Jisung ran off, citing something about how the onions were making him cry. Jaemin and Serim graciously pretended they didn’t see the plastic grocery store bag full of them across from them on the counter, untouched. “You couldn’t have just – I don’t know – heard him out?”

“You know, if someone told me that high school didn’t matter when I was his age, I’d thank them,” Jaemin says, clumsily chopping off the ends of an onion.

During his own senior year, it’d taken Renjun a good two months into their fall semester to bring up that they probably weren’t going to end up at the same college. They’d been sitting on the benches outside their school library sharing a Coke that they’d caved in and splurged for from the vending machine. “I think I –” Renjun began hesitantly. The late afternoon sun tinted his hands honey, splotchy from where it was filtering down upon them through the overgrown tree. He twirled the can around and Jaemin was painfully aware of the million ways Renjun could cleave his heart in two in that very moment. “I’m applying to a film program.”

“Oh.” There was only one university that had a film school between the few they’d vaguely talked about applying to, and that wasn’t the one that had offered Jaemin a partial ride. And it was silly to plan their lives out before them when the future was so nebulous that Jaemin couldn’t even see his hand when he held it in front of his face, but he’d imagined them dorming together, talking to each other with the lights turned off before they fell asleep each night, and waking up to do it all over again. “I’m happy for you, Injunnie.”

Renjun glanced at him briefly before turning his gaze back to the opening of the can. “I –” he paused, carefully choosing his next words. “I thought you’d be more upset. That our first choices aren’t the same school.”

Jaemin nudged his shoulder with a grin. “Why would I be upset?” he said. He could feel his selfish disappointment congeal to the back of his throat, but if he didn’t throw himself into it, Jaemin thought in that moment he might break. Jaemin thought he might break. “I’ll support you with whatever you do, you know that?”

Serim stops eyeing him warily to grate her carrots. “But that doesn’t mean that’s what Jisung needs,” she points out. “You can’t just think other people want what you want.”

“I’m just being honest,” Jaemin defends, jutting his jaw out childishly. Sometimes he wondered if things would’ve gone differently if he’d asked Renjun to stay. Go to the same college as him. Would they still end up breaking up the way they did, or would they still be together, and happy? “Don’t you think that’s suffocating, living your life not being able to say what you think?”

Serim sighs. She puts down the carrot she was working on, but doesn’t bother to look at him this time. “Haven’t you ever thought your honesty could be a liability?”

Once, March of last year when their spring breaks happened to coincide, Renjun asked if he’d wanted to join his family for dim sum. He’d brought it up in the most nonchalant manner, like he did when something precisely meant a lot to him. “It’s my late birthday celebration,” he shrugged as Jaemin drove them back from a late night movie viewing. The still-illuminated sign of a nearby McDonald’s tinted half his face a pineapple yellow as they stopped at a traffic light. “They said I could invite some friends.”

“Of course,” Jaemin said easily. “Is Donghyuck coming too?”

Renjun turned to stare out the passenger side window. “No.” In its darkness, Jaemin could see his small smile reflected on the surface, and behind that, his own dopier, fallen-in-love face he knew he must’ve shown in response. “Just you.”

They spent the morning before on a crash-course of basic dim sum restaurant Chinese, of which they got distracted making out in the backseat of Jaemin’s car for a good twenty minutes of it. “Honestly, the way you say _baozi_ makes my ears bleed,” was the first thing Renjun laughed after they’d parted to catch their breath, his mouth kiss-swollen and all Jaemin could stare at.

“But I’m charming,” Jaemin insisted, leaning forward to give Renjun his best puppy eyed look. “That’s got to make up for all my flaws, right?”

Renjun put a hand on his shoulder to push him away. “Doesn’t mean you can pronounce _erhua_ for shit.”

Jaemin tried his best not to show his smile as he deadpanned, “I’d like to think that I’m pretty talented with my tongue.”

Renjun punched his shoulder. _“God,_ Jaemin Na!” It cracked across his face anyway, bleeding out from the corners of his mouth.

In the end, Renjun’s parents ordered for the table and, distracted by Renjun’s baby cousin, no one paid much attention to Jaemin at all. _sorry,_ Renjun texted him halfway through, when his aunt was chasing down a cart-pusher for shumai. _this must b awkward for u lol._

“No,” Jaemin whispered over the laughter of Renjun’s relatives as his aunt successfully flagged down the waitress. It felt like seeing a slice of Renjun’s life that he’d never be a part of otherwise, the splitting flesh of an orange sectioned into eighths, bottom of the plate still wet from washing tracking a dark stain on the cream tablecloth. He reached under the tablecloth for Renjun’s hand, giving it a quick squeeze before letting go. “I’m having fun.” And he remembers the lazy Susan spinning round and round and round, and the way Renjun looked at him like there was no place he’d rather be than that crowded and noisy restaurant, surrounded by people who didn’t know how much they actually meant to each other.

Because – when the Earth finally rotates back to the present but Jaemin’s still spinning circles and circles around Renjun as if he held all the gravity of the universe within his slight shoulders – what Renjun's message reads is this:

_u know yangyang liu?_

But what Renjun really means is (liberty taken with the interpretation by Jaemin, whose Renjun is rusty half from the ensuing distance from the break-up, half from the belated realization that maybe he never quite knew Renjun as well as he indulged himself to believe he did):

_can we talk?_

And truthfully, for all the hours in school he spent staring at Renjun instead of his textbooks, Jaemin doesn't know the right answer to that by heart anymore.

An aside but: yes, Jaemin does know Yangyang Liu, in a broad sense of the word. This broad sense boiling down to – rewind to that time Jaemin threw up on Mark’s couch, and turn the tape back an additional three hours before that to when he was still mildly sober and scouring Mark’s frat boy friend’s kitchen for something else to drink.

“You good with tequila?” someone asked just as Jaemin was about to bang his head on the kitchen counter at the sight of the empty cooler. “I think there’s leftover lime slices in the fridge.”

Jaemin looked over his shoulder from where he was leaning to glance at him. Even in the dim party lighting, he smiled wide with what Jaemin recognized was – _entirely too many teeth,_ Renjun had told him once when they were looking at their blurry high school graduation selfies while in line for drive-through In-N-Out. _You’ve got a fucking carnivore smile, you know that?_ And just as Jaemin leaned over the console to bite his shoulder and prove a point, the car behind them honked.

“Whatever gets me shitfaced, honestly,” Jaemin replied. The guy laughed, stacked the lime wedges on a small paper plate he rummaged out from one of the cabinets, and poured some salt onto the side. “You live here or something?”

He shrugged. “Or something.” Jaemin gave him a weird look but followed him out onto the tiny balcony anyway. The night air was balmy from a mix of the last bit of summer heat and the carryover of crushing body heat from the living room. “I was in this frat for, like, three weeks and then I dropped out. My old Big still invites me to all the parties though. Lets me steal the good stuff ‘cause he’s trying to win me back.” He held up the tequila bottle for good measure. Even in the dark, Jaemin could tell it was just Jose Cuervo.

“Cool,” Jaemin said lamely. He kicked a pedal of a parked bike leaning against the railing in the middle of sitting down and the resulting one and a half rotations scratched the skin that was exposed between the end of his jeans and his sneakers. “So… how do you do this?”

The other guy paused in between twisting the bottle open. “Wait, you’ve never had tequila with lime and salt before?”

Jaemin shook his head. “That life changing?” he asked, just as another carnivorous smile grew in the darkness to mirror his own.

They took turns taking swigs from the handle, licking the salt off their index fingers and sucking on lime slices, slightly dried out from sitting in the refrigerator too long, talking about nothing in particular. “You should follow me on Instagram,” the other guy suggested easily after video-ing Jaemin’s first failed attempt of a tequila shot and getting his permission to post it on his story. “It’s just my name. Yangyang-underscore-Liu. All lowercase.” And Jaemin clumsily pulled up the app with his thumb, holding a lime wedge between his teeth to stamp out the bitter aftertaste of the liquor, before typing it into the search bar and clicking the follow button like a sheep.

“You know,” Jaemin heard himself say once half the tequila was gone and there was a pleasant warmth settling in his stomach. “I thought that once I got out of high school, things would be, like,” he paused, waiting for the echo of his disembodied-sounding voice to peter out, “Fucking… different or some shit like that. Like my life would really begin, all of a sudden. But it’s –” He sucked on the inside of his cheek. “I don’t know. Life just goes on, pretty much the same.”

He hadn’t realized he’d been looking at Yangyang closely enough that he thought he could see the reflection of the nearly-full moon in his round eyes. When he did, Jaemin instinctively dropped his gaze to Yangyang’s mouth, moving and making words, and wet his lips with his tongue.

Yangyang suddenly laughed. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

Jaemin sputtered into motion, slow from the haze of the alcohol, blinking. “No,” he couldn’t help but answer truthfully.

Yangyang moved the plate between them away. His knee was dangerously close to knocking over the Jose Cuervo sitting on the concrete, and the faint light coming from the open kitchen door caught in his eyes that looked at Jaemin with a sort of serious intent through his lashes, and Jaemin thought for a wayward second that Yangyang was actually going to fucking eat him.

“Is this –?” Yangyang started, flicking his gaze down to Jaemin’s lips. The Jose Cuervo tilted and re-righted as he brought himself close enough to put a hand on Jaemin’s knee to anchor himself there.

Jaemin leaned in closer, just to see if their lips would touch. Physically, of course, it was entirely possible, but mentally, mentally he was still stuck in his seventeen-year-old body, staring over the aquamarine glow of the pool lights at this beautiful boy he was head-over-heels in love with, wading towards him slowly with his heart in his hands. What would the seventeen-year-old version of himself say if he saw him now? What would –

Jaemin pulled away abruptly. In the world's most poorly worded _it's not you, it's me_ he blurted, “I’m a serial monogamist,” straight into Yangyang’s confused face before he could even get a word in.

Yangyang paused, hand still warm over Jaemin’s jean-covered knee. He licked his teeth as if to wipe the taste of Jaemin away. Man-eating smile aside, his mouth had been soft, and he’d tasted more like lime than the liquor, and it hadn’t been a bad kiss at all, Jaemin just – “I mean,” Yangyang started with an unaffected shrug. He moved his hand off of Jaemin. “That’s, like, cool. I guess.”

“I.” Jaemin stood up quickly and the world tilted as he staggered to regain his balance. The moon was bright and he couldn’t shake the sense that he’d fucked something up again and, on top of all that, he was pointedly very drunk. “I’m –” he screwed his eyes shut, hoping the dizziness would subside, “I should probably go find my friend. Mark Lee. Uh, sorry.”

“No worries, man,” Yangyang said, reaching for an untouched lime slice oddly the same shape of his smiling mouth. “This was fun.”

The first time he’d kissed Renjun, Jaemin thought the world re-calibrated itself. As stupid and all-encompassingly juvenille high school as it sounded, it felt like Renjun had become the center of gravity of his universe in that moment, and Jaemin couldn’t imagine being in love with anyone else.

And _god,_ that’s when it all hit him, slap in the face – “Yeah, for me too,” replied Jaemin with as much sincerity he could manage. He stumbled back into the kitchen and shut the balcony door clumsily behind him. And then he leaned his side against it, feeling like he might cry or throw up or feel completely nothing at all, all at once.

This is what it comes down to. Cheap liquor in red Solo cups on a Thursday night. Pushing his way through the sweaty bodies on the makeshift living room dance floor, some disco light machine in the corner pasting artificial scintillations on the walls at a bad frat party. Somehow managing to get himself down a flight of stairs so he can sit on the front steps of the frat house, not far down the street from where Renjun confessed to him with his breath creating clouds in the cold night air that he didn’t love him anymore.

Sometimes, Jaemin thought that holding onto these memories had to be a testament to how much they’d meant to him. That if Renjun didn’t care anymore between the two of them, then Jaemin had to be the one to remember, or else they’d forget about these old versions of themselves that they thought would live within them forever.

“Hey, Jaemin?” Mark finds him sometime after midnight. He crouches on the concrete step above his. “You good, man?”

It felt like other times he’d never get over it. Like he was so fixated on things he couldn’t change to the point that he was still stuck in that place where Renjun had left him, and he’d never be able to move forward. Jaemin rubs at his face with his palm. “I think I had too much to drink,” he admits miserably.

Mark lets out a short laugh. “Dude, I’ve totally been there. And I’m, like, pretty sure everyone else’s hammered.” He slots his own fingers together, tapping to the distant bass of the speakers, when Jaemin doesn’t reply. “I – you, you want me to help you get home?”

Jaemin turns to look at him over his shoulder. “Yeah,” he agrees after a beat, forcing himself to get up, “let’s go home.”

“Would you ever write me a love letter?”

Jaemin blinked up at Renjun from where he’d put his head in his lap. The noon sun was directly overhead and he reached for one of Renjun’s hands to shield the glare from his face. “Mm, of course,” he yawned to stifle the smile threatening to show from thinking about his own joke. “But only if you’re willing to proofread it like all my Lit AP essays.”

“Ugh.” Jaemin laughed as Renjun swatted his hand away. “Never mind. Knowing you and your awful reading comprehension, it’ll take me forever to go through. You’ll probably come up with something worse than ‘lizard smile’ and ‘dumb hair.’”

Jaemin lifted an index finger to blot out the sun. He then shifted it left to poke Renjun in the chin. “Mind you, I’m _very_ romantic, Injunnie.”

Renjun grinned. “Okay, _Romeo_ Na.” He flicked him on the forehead in retaliation, only to bring his face closer when Jaemin fake-cried in response, until all they could really make out in the entire expanse of the universe in that singular moment was each other. “Then tell me,” and Jaemin felt his words against his skin, “What are you gonna write about?”

He thought about it, bringing his knees in. Renjun didn’t move any closer or farther away. And then Jaemin opened his mouth, and began, “I’d write –”

Their last fight was over something trivial and, incidentally, a week before they actually broke up. They’d been standing in the rain at the metro stop near Jaemin’s dorm opposite of each other, raising their voices over the weather and slowly soaking through.

 _“Jaemin,”_ Renjun urged, the shoulders of his green hoodie turning dark in the downpour. “Can we please go inside and talk about this? We’re both gonna catch a cold at this rate.”

Jaemin laughed through his nose. "Does our relationship really mean so little to you?" He could feel his t-shirt stick to his skin with the weight of the rain and fingers go numb from feeling entirely too little and entirely too much, simultaneously. "Renjun, I bought you those headphones for our anniversary. Don't you know how long I had to work my shitty job at the student union to save up for those? Don't you –" He pushed his sopping hair out of his face in frustration. "If you can just throw them away so easily like that, then what does that mean about us?"

Renjun's mouth set into a hard line. He remembers this precisely, how unfamiliar it looked to him then. "Well, what do you want me to do? You want me to call the fucking metro office and tell them to stop the train? Jaemin –"

Renjun broke off suddenly and Jaemin felt the water pool in the depression of his slides. He'd always had this certain way of looking at people when he was particularly upset about something, as if he didn't know them at all. "Jaemin, this isn't even about – fucking – _us._ I'm fucking standing right in front of you, not chasing after some goddamn headphones, and you're still –" His lips pressed into that same line again, and maybe that was his tell, about how they were never supposed to end up with each other. "Let's just go inside first. _Please."_

Through the rainfall, Jaemin stared at this boy he thought he could love forever. Neither of them made any move to walk away. "You can care about someone but also understand that some physical things hold meaning for the two of you." He could hear his own voice shaking. "Those things aren't mutually exclusive. I'm just so tired of being the one who –" Jaemin cut himself off.

Renjun's expression steeled. "The one who what?"

"Renjun, it doesn't matter."

"No," Renjun interjected, gesturing with his hands. _"Please tell me,_ Jaemin."

And this is where Jaemin lied. Because he had broken Renjun's heart and let the rain flush out the blood stain left behind at that metro stop by his old dorm that Jaemin's been walking the long way around since, and he knew he'd had the capacity for it all along, in just eight syllables that could barely be heard over the downpour: "The one who cares more about us."

Their senior prom was honestly a sham that baited FOMO-driven high schoolers into spending fifty bucks of their parent's money on a subpar night in what could've been thrown in their school's own gymnasium but ended up taking place instead in a poorly lit venue twenty miles away. Jaemin knew because he'd been peer-pressured into asking someone to go every year except the one that actually mattered.

"It'll be boring," Jaemin insisted even after he'd said yes. "And a complete waste of money. Like, as soon as you walk in, you'll totally regret it."

Renjun looked over at him, eyes lit up with excitement. He never said anything to give it away, but he was hopelessly a romantic at heart, down to the cliché hyped-up rituals of every romcom. "Do they buy all the snacks from Costco?"

"Probably," Jaemin snorted.

Renjun's smile grew even wider at that. "Perfect," he declared.

"The Costco snacks?" Jaemin shifted in the driver's seat to face him directly. His throat went strangely raw for a beat. "Or your boyfriend with the herniated disc who's not gonna be able to dance all night with you?"

Renjun reached over to press a dandelion wisp-light kiss on his cheek. "Both," he said as he traced the same area with his thumb in circles, as if to rub it in like an auspicious charm.

Their conversation that Jaemin always loops back around to that'd taken place on Renjun's dorm room twin bed their first year of college, not long after their first real argument. They'd still felt apologetic and so Renjun began gingerly, "Sometimes I feel like you're terrifyingly in love with me."

Jaemin pressed his cheek against the wall they were both leaning their backs against to look at him. "Like I could drown in your love because there's just so much of it, and you're always giving me even more, if that makes sense." Renjun laughed shortly to himself, eyes fixated on a spot straight ahead. "Sometimes, it's overwhelming."

"You can't drown in my love," Jaemin simply pointed out. The bed creaked as he shifted close enough that their shoulders pressed together. "You can breath down there."

Renjun moved to rest his head into Jaemin's neck. "Hypothetically?"

"Hypothetically," Jaemin confirmed.

Jaemin could feel Renjun's smile against the thin fabric of his t-shirt. "What is this, Schrödinger's cat for feelings?" The overcast sky outside Renjun's window was muted but Jaemin felt the vibrations of Renjun's words through his fingertips and his heartbeat from where they were pressed together beat alongside his own. That was all that mattered in that moment. "Love isn't some kind of thought experiment, you know."

Jaemin reached for Renjun's hand across the halfheartedly folded bed sheets. "Don't you think it'd be the other way around?" he asked after a pause. "That we'd drown without each other?"

Renjun looked up at him from where he'd leaned his head on his shoulder. "We won't have to figure out," he responded as Jaemin bent down to kiss him. "Right?" he exhaled right against his mouth before their lips could touch.

Jaemin held his breath –

He stares at Renjun’s text on his phone, fingers hovering over the keyboard. _hey,_ he tries before backspacing. _injunnie,_ but that’s not right either.

Now, Jaemin inhales.

 _renjun,_ he finally types out without deleting.

And then in the distance, Jaemin thinks he can see the shoreline.

**Author's Note:**

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